For someone used to the small town links that stretch across both countries where I live, the distances between places in Australia has begun to boggle my mind. The other day and night, 1500 kilometers between there and here on a Greyhound bus. Inside the bus a woman and her two children, their faces told of an escape from Darwin, destination Perth. A nurse on her way to an outback posting, a boy on his way home to a stop in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, just a jeep with its lights on parked by the side of the road. A few other workers heading to God Knows where, three Indigenous Australian women heading to visit relations in Port Headland and two hospitality workers on their way to new horizons.
As the bus careened down the endless highway, stopping at outback station boxes to collect and deliver mail, the off duty bus driver flirted harmlessly with me, the mother roused at her kids and the nurse read Amy Tan with a smile of delight on her face. Whether that delight was medicated or whether it had to do with leaving Broome, I am not sure. Broome taught me not to probe too deeply into the stories of people washed up on that remote shore. The bus driver kept insisting he had seen me somewhere before, did I catch the bus up from Perth, he asked? I hadn’t. Did we meet in Perth? I hadn’t been in Perth long enough to meet all my relations there and had barely left my cousins house, so No. Suddenly, I realised where he may have seen me before and suggested to him that perhaps he had seen me before in His Wildest Dreams? You can be that cheeky to these Australians, they respect nothing more than the odd humorous dose of disrespect. Between dozing and reading and searching the landscape for signs of Something, Anything other than scrub and ghostly gum trees, the odd straggling cow and squashed kangaroo a tyre on the bus shredded itself. The resulting clang of metal on the road got everyone excited and the male passengers filed off the bus to inspect the damage and help the drivers. The women stood around, smoked and got back on the bus. Eventually the tyre was replaced and off we went again. That was the highlight of the entire trip.
As the sun set over the Australian outback, the bus driver advised us on safe travel. From this point on there would and could be stock on the road. Should the bus hit a kangaroo, he said we would simply feel a bump in the night. Should we hit a cow then we could be thrown forward in our seats and those of us who may be halfway between our seat and the toilet could expect to go flying down the aisles. Accordingly, people who planned to sleep were advised to keep their “body parts” inside the seating area.
He wasn’t wrong about the Roo’s. Two kangaroos met the front of the Greyhound during the night with a resounding BUMP. I covered my eyes and whispered a prayer for a better rebirth for them and prayed like HELL that we didn’t meet a cow along the road. Half way through the night, halfway on the road between Broome and Perth, two of us alighted from the Greyhound bus. While the driver inspected the Roo Damage, we transferred our luggage to the bus that would take us to Exmouth, in the Ningaloo district.
Ningaloo is famous for its Marine Park and kilometres of Coral Coastline, most of which is protected from development. Here, depending on the season, you can snorkel with whale sharks, watch turtles hatching and snorkel along coral reefs with crystal clear water. The town that supports the tourist industry of Ningaloo is as you see here. With a base population of 2000 people, it swells during the season to 10,000. The rest of the year people are just passing through. You may be familiar with the term a “One Horse Town”, but it’s hardly fair to describe Exmouth as such. I would go so far as to describe it as a “Two Emu Town” this is what I opened my eyes to on my first day in Exmouth.